Fri, December 13, 2013

The Department of English extends its hearty congratulations to Professor Marjorie Woods, who has been accomplishing quite a lot lately! Firstly, she has been chosen to deliver the second annual E. H. Gombrich Lectures, a new annual series of Lectures on Aspects of the Classical Tradition, “named in honour of Professor Sir Ernst Gombrich FBA OM, Director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition, University of London.” These lectures are given at the Warburg Institute each year by one distinguished member of Classical scholarship, and they are subsequently published by Princeton University Press.

In the spring of 2015, Professor Woods will be writing up her lectures for this publication at All Souls College at the University of Oxford, where she has been awarded a visiting fellowship.

Professor Woods’s lectures and subsequent book will explore emotional passages of classical texts that manuscript glosses and commentaries suggest were studied most frequently in western Europe during the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Dr. Woods is particularly interested in how male students engaged with speeches by female characters in these texts. Dr. Woods will examine this academic focus on women’s words and thoughts and the pedagogical possibilities it provided for the young men studying these passages to grow linguistically and to experience and process emotions in an academic setting, thus perhaps gaining a deeper understanding of the text.

To top it all off, Professor Woods has also recently received her fourth Faculty Achievement Award from the Texas Blazers. Congratulations, Professor Woods!